Doin' it yourself

I've got this thing about fixing things myself so that I don't have to pay someone else to do them. That way, I save money and I get the satisfaction of completing a project all by myself. Some of things that I have currently or recently taken care of myself: Changing the oil and brake pads in my cars; installing my own TV mount for my flat screen; and mounting the microwave above my stove (with a little help from my dad).

There has been one project looming over my head that I have yet to tackle, and that is the shower in the master bathroom. It seems that it has one of those anti-scald devices so the best that you can get with your shower is better than warm but way less than hot. This isn't a huge problem for me but it is for my wife because she likes to flirt with second degree burns when she takes her showers. Right now I've been the only one to take showers there since Kellie goes to the other bathroom where she can crank up the Fahrenheit all she wants.

Tonight I set out to change all of that. I found the installation guide and also Googled how to make the proper adjustments in the handle so that I could override the anti-scalding guard. I began to work on disassembling the handle so that I could locate this elusive anti-scalding guard, and as I got close to getting the inside of the handle removed the water came on. Guess who forget to cut the water off in the basement? After I remedied that minor snafu I inspected all of the essential parts and tweaked a little of this and a little of that. I carefully put the pieces back together and went back down to turn the water back on.

When I came upstairs the shower was running and I couldn't turn it off. Guess who put a piece back in upside down? So I turned the water off again, disassembled the handle again, put it back together again, and then tried the shower. Guess what? It ran hot. Really hot. Somehow, someway I turned something the right way and now my shower runs slightly below skin blistering temperature.

The funny thing about this particular do-it-yourself project is that even though I got the results that I wanted, I had no idea how I did it. I really didn't change anything at all when I took the handle apart. Call it dumb luck but I must have accidentally made the right adjustment so that the hot water could come out in force.

There are times when I try to do-it-myself with God. I undertake a Bible study plan that I believe will please Him and hopefully make me smarter. Prayer isn't always the first thing that comes to my mind. Instead I try to figure stuff out on my own, turning to prayer only when I realize I'm in a bind. Since I'm a pastor I sometimes believe that my account is a little more full since I went to seminary and work at a church. That way I'm just naturally closer to God, right?

But God has His ways of humbling me and revealing Himself in ways that I could never imagine, often in the midst of the mundane. God doesn't need me to do it myself. He doesn't need me to do for Him either. In fact, God doesn't need me at all. My whole purpose on this earth is not to have fellowship with God (as if God is lonely and needed to create me to fill a void in His life). No, I'm here for the sole purpose of bringing glory to His name. It's not about me. It's about God. And the most amazing thing about all of this is that even though I can't do anything for myself when it comes to trying to draw close to God, He chooses to draw me to Him anyway and lavishes me with His grace and His love (Ephesians 1:8). That beats any petty project that I could ever do around my house.